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The stream of data from vision does NOT explain why humans learn 1000x faster: Children who lost their sight early on, can grow up to be intelligent. They can l
by trott 2y ago
The stream of data from vision does NOT explain why humans learn 1000x faster: Children who lost their sight early on, can grow up to be intelligent. They can learn English, for example. They don't need to hear 200B words, like GPT-3.
- bhickey 2y agoThe human brain isn't randomly initialized. It's undergone 500m years of pretraining.
- LoganDark 2y agoThis makes me wonder if human brains can be genetically predisposed to a particular dominant language. I'd imagine not since that isn't typically a factor in selection, but I still wonder.
- bhickey 2y agoI doubt it. Language and human evolution operate on different time scales. We wouldn't be able to converse with someone from 13th century England. If anything I will expect selective pressure on languages—those that are easy to use are more likely to be adopted. Secondarily, I would expect this effect to be swamped by other factors (e.g. conquest).
- Grimblewald 2y agoFrom what I have read and have come to understand, it is more that we are generally predisposed to human language in general, specific portions of our brain especially so.
- LoganDark 2y ago> it is more that we are generally predisposed to human language in general I understand, that's not what I was wondering.
- trott 2y ago> The human brain isn't randomly initialized. It's undergone 500m years of pretraining. All of the information accumulated by evolution gets passed through DNA. For humans, that's well under 1GB. Probably a very tiny fraction of that determines how the brain works at the algorithmic level. You should think of this information as the "software" of the brain, not pretrained LLM weights (350GB for GPT-3).
- LoganDark 2y agoHumans use bottom-up reinforcement learning, but nearly all LLMs use gradient descent. Not only are those completely different directions (bottom-up as in humans versus top-down as in gradient descent) with completely different emergent behavior, but minimizing loss is not in the reward function of a human, even if schools like to think it makes for an effective education. (I'd argue it doesn't.)
- lostmsu 2y agoEven audio is several magnitudes larger. Uncompressed stereo is 100 kilobytes per second. So an hour is already 0.5 gigabytes. A year is ~3 TB.
- trott 2y ago> Uncompressed stereo is 100 kilobytes per second. How much of that is cognitively useful for learning English? On top of the textual content, audio gives you emphasis and mood. Not a lot of information in that -- a few bits per sentence.
- lostmsu 2y agoNearly all of it. You need a lot of pictures without cats to explain what a cat is.
- makapuf 2y agoBut you don't need millions of pictures of lions as a kid to know what a lion is.
- lostmsu 2y agoNeither do CNNs, so I don't quite see your point. You are throwing numbers without good estimates. Get descent estimates for both children and NNs then make categorical conclusions. Better even measure in bytes. And remember that kids look at video, not at individual pictures (even if these are videos of pictures).
- trott 2y ago> Nearly all of it. Maybe you misunderstood me. I'm not talking about learning to understand spoken English. You don't need hearing or vision at all to grow up to be intelligent (and able to write English).
- lostmsu 2y ago